Much attention in the health care industry has been placed on reducing the incidence of medication dosing errors and improving overall quality of patient care. Often medication dosing errors occur because a patient receives the wrong medication, a wrong dosage of the correct medication, the correct dosage of the correct medication at the wrong time, or the medication has harmful interaction with other drugs. Recent advances in the health care field have attempted to address these problems and to enhance efficiency and quality of patient care.
Many drugs are dispensed for patient use at or close to the point of care using programmable infusion pumps such as those disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 5,713,856 to Eggers et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 5,041,086 to Koenig et al., both of which are incorporated herein by reference. Eggers et al. discloses a modular patient care system capable of providing therapy to a patient and monitoring patient condition. The system of Eggers utilizes a central control module to control and monitor a number of functional modules, including one or more infusion pumps and patient monitoring devices.
Most hospitals today have a pharmacy equipped with a computerized system for entering, preparing, and tracking prescriptions, managing drug inventory, checking for drug incompatibilities, and printing prescription orders and labels. Typically, one or more medication infusions to be administered to a patient are prescribed by the patient's physician. The pharmacy prepares the infusion solution according to the physician's prescription and places the solution in an IV bag, syringe or other container. A printed label identifying the container contents, the patient to whom the medication is prescribed, the prescribing physician, delivery instructions and/or other information regarding the prescription. The label is generally typed or printed in human readable characters. In some instances, bar codes are used to encode information on the label.
After a label is affixed, the container is transported to the patient's location and operatively attached to a bedside infusion pump system, such as that disclosed by Eggers et al. A nurse or other care provider then programs the infusion system with drug delivery data from the label, typically by manually entering infusion parameters using a keyboard or a keypad. Alternatively, some systems seek to reduce data entry errors by incorporating a bar code reader that scans coded data into the pump system from the drug label or from a prescription order. The data may include, for example, rate of infusion, total volume to be infused (VTBI) and, in multichannel or modular systems such as that described by Eggers et al., which channel or pump module is to be used.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,153,827 to Coutré et al. discloses a system for providing an infusion apparatus with medication infusion parameters from a central pharmacy database. Infusion delivery parameters for a particular treatment are printed from the central pharmacy database on a machine-readable labels, which are then carried to the patient location and scanned into the bedside infusion apparatus. The system of Coutré requires that all information used to program a pump is either scanned from a machine-readable label or entered manually by the user. Thus, the infusion systems of Coutré do not utilize information from other sources within the hospital or within the system itself.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,781,442 to Engleson et al. discloses a patient care management system comprised of a network of computers having a variety of input and output devices for receiving patient data and for generating or displaying reports. The disclosed system monitors ongoing administrations of care to patients and automatically updates records and provides alarms when necessary. In an example of use, patient and drug identification information are scanned into a bedside terminal and communicated to a central computer, where the data are processed. The central computer then sends operating parameters to the terminal and the terminal programs an infusion pump in accordance with the operating parameters.
In spite of recent advances in the art, there remains a need in the art for a system that facilitates efficient and accurate programming of a medical treatment device while ensuring that the prescribed treatment conforms with institutional and departmental guidelines with respect to a patient in a particular location and/or with particular characteristics.